Arizona weekly enterprise., 1887-12-17
RUSSIANS AMONG THE CLOUDS.
On the Plateau of the .Pamir-NIarco Po-
 los Fables verined-To India.

OAA tfA6 IIaLe3u Ot tne esIdn1r-NlarC0 PO-
 los Fables verined-To India.
 The Russians have fairly established themselves on one of the plateaus of the Pamir, that greatest protuberance of the world, which the Chinese said a thousand years ago was midway between heaven and earth, and which the natives call 1.-The Roof of the World.'' Twenty years ago about all we knew of the Pamir was contained in a single chapter of Marco Polo's travels. The remarkable facts presented in this chapter were cited for many years as specimens of the fables spun by this much discredited writer. In the history of discovery no early writer has been so brilliantly sustained by mod ern researches as Marco Polo has been by the Russian explorers who have overrun the Panir in all directions, and have found that his picture is almost photo graphic in its accuracy.
 Polo said that the herdsmen on the Pamir made fences of the enormous horns of wild mountain sheep to inclose their cattle at night. The Russians have found these horns nearly five feet in length, and a man could not lift pair of them. Polo asserted that on these lofty table lands he
 
 give out much heat, and the same phe- nomenon, due to the rarefication of the air, has been observed by all recent Pamir travellers. He said these plains afforded the best pasture in the world, and that a lean beast would fatten there i'll ten days. A recent writer says: 1.-The grass of the Pamir is so rich that sorry horse is here brought into good condition in less than twenty days.''
 These plains are diversified by low ridges, and here and there lofty moun- tain with snow capped tops, rivaling the great summits of the Himalayas. But from the plain where the traveller sees them they do not appear to be higher than our own Mount Washington, for they rest upon plateaus that are from 10000 to 16,000 feet high, and whose mean elevation above the sea is more than twice that of the top of Mount Washing ton. This is the reason that the moun- tains of the Pamir and of its eastern ex- tension, that walls in Thibet on the north, are not particularly impressive in appear ance, though they are among the loftiest summits of the world.
 It is just below the loftiest of these Pamir plateaus near Lake Sarakul that the Russians are building cantonments for their troops and feeding their horses on the succulent grasses that Polo de- scribed. Why they have invaded these forbidding heights, where no crops can ripen and no vegetation except grass flourishes, is a mystery that time will doubtless make clear. We only know that there they are within 15O miles of the Indian frontier, and that almost at their feet is the Afghan state of Badakh- shan, which is more nearly allied in sym pathy and interest to the Russian depend ency of Bokhara than to England s protege, the ameer.
 The passages of the Alps by Hannibal and Napoleon are famous in the history of military exploits; but no commander has ever led his troops to such enormous heights as those which the soldiers of the czar now occupy. Tradition says that the great Aryan invasion that peopled Europe started from these Pamir heights, following westward the classic Oxus and Jaxartes, at whose fountain heads the Russians now water their horses. It would thus appear that the lusty descend ants of these Aryan forefathers, bent on reconquering the East from which they sprung, have reached at last the great distributing point from which their an cient progenitors passed with their herds into the low lying west, or southward into the valleys of India.-New York Sun.